Labour suspended 50 members for racist comments

The British Labour party has suspended 50 members over anti-Semitic and racist comments over the past two months, according to the Telegraph.

The newspaper quotes senior sources who say last week’s suspension of Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, and Naz Shah, a Labour MP, are just “the tip of the iceberg.”

According to the Telegraph, the problem is much bigger and “the compliance unit has actually suspended 50 members in the past two months.”

The events have put pressure on the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn ahead of Thursday’s local elections in the U.K.

It emerged on Monday that the party suspended three councillors within seven hours over a series of allegedly anti-Semitic posts on social media. Two of them had called for Israeli Jews to be relocated to America while another compared a former Premier League footballer to Hitler.

Lucy Powell, the shadow education secretary, told Channel 4 News on Sunday that Labour had a problem with anti-Semitism.

“There clearly is an issue with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party otherwise we wouldn’t have spent the best part of the last six or seven days talking about it,” Powell said.

Corbyn rejected those claims on Monday, insisting there wasn’t a “huge problem” with anti-Semitism in Labour and vowed to stay on as leader. He told the Daily Mail that he could face a challenge but said he was “not having sleepless nights” over it.